Advanced Television

Sharp technology “167% improvement on 4K”

January 8, 2015

By Chris Forrester

sharpThe broadcast display industry is already moving beyond the 8.3 megapixels needed to reflect 4K Ultra-HD. Most display manufacturers use even more ‘pixels’ in the 4K rendering by sub-dividing the 8.3 megapixels into three components (a red, green and blue subpixel).

But Japanese manufacturer Sharp has used the giant CES show to argue that its 66 million subpixels gives the company’s units a 167 per cent improvement on ‘ordinary’ 4K sets.

According to the BBC’s Technology editor Leo Kelion:  “Sharp adds a yellow subpixel to the mix and then divides each of the four subpixels in two, allowing the TV to control each of the resulting eight subpixels individually. The firm says that with this level of detail our eyes find it hard to distinguish a TV image from the real world, even when stood centimetres from the display. It’s like looking through a window.”

The BBC quotes David Mercer, senior analyst at Strategy Analytics, who adds: “The reality is that the bigger TVs get, the closer people are willing to sit so long as the definition continues to improve,” says Mercer. “And what we’re already finding with Ultra-HD is that people are sitting proportionally closer to the screen than they would for lower resolutions.”

Categories: Articles, UHD, Ultra-HD/4K